Gallery Yamaki Fine Art will hold the first solo exhibition of Tatsuo Kimura (1921-2017) from Thursday, 29^th April to Friday, 28^th May, 2021. Kimura was born in 1921 in Sumiyoshi, Osaka. After graduating from junior high school, he moved to Tokyo in 1939 and attended the Nogizaka slope drawing research institute, where he began to formally study painting. The following year, he entered the oil painting department of Tokyo Fine Arts School (currently Tokyo University of the Arts). After graduating from the school in 1943, he joined the Army High-Fire Corps in Shimonoseki until the end of the war. When there were no supplies left after the war, the ingenuity of using an apple box to customize furniture in a 6-mat room was covered by Kurashinotecho magazine – familiar in Toto Neechan.

In 1946, he started working as a painter. In 1950, he moved to Kokubunji and actively presented his works in solo and group exhibitions. In the 1950s, he visited Paris, Rome, Heidelberg, Athens, Madrid, Morocco, etc. to further deepen his painting career. In 1995, he was taken by the scenery near the mouth of the Kikukawa River in Kuniyasu, Kakegawa City, and moved to Kuniyasu from Tokyo at the age of 74. Since then, he continued to produce works in Kuniyasu.

Kimura’s works range from common mediums such as oil on canvas to mixed media, which combines sand, plaster, bonds, collected metal items and pieces of wood, ceramic plates, and objects. Through these unique mediums, Kimura has constructed a unique world with his individualistic methods. Kimura’s point of view, which freely moves between abstraction and concreteness, appears to gently engage with objects to express its history and inner workings.

We hope you will take this opportunity to see the extraordinary beauty of Kimura’s works.

Exhibition contributor: Emmy company

○×⌼ (1985) 51×65cm Acrylic paint, mixed media, board